“Do not congratulate me, Emily,” he said: “it is a vast and fearful responsibility. My career would have been a simpler and happier one without it; but it is God’s will to call me to a more prominent position, and I must not shrink from the cares and duties it will impose upon me.” He paused, then with a forced smile, which most ineffectually concealed his agitation> continued, “I should make but a poor advocate, I fear; for here am I setting forth all the evils and difficulties of my new position, when my object in coming here—an object in the attainment of which the whole happiness of my existence is centered—is to ask you to share it.” He then in a few simple, truthful, and therefore eloquent words, told her of his deep affection for her, and of his earnest desire to do what mortal might, to guard her from, or to mitigate, all the sorrows which more or less fall to the lot of each of us, confident that, in striving to provide for her happiness, he should insure his own.
Emily heard him to the end without interruption, and, save that she grew paler, and that her features assumed a more, fixed and immovable expression, she evinced no sign of being in the slightest degree affected by his appeal. When he had concluded, she thanked him for the compliment he had paid her, but informed him that, although she should always regard him in the light of a dear and valued friend, and hoped he would, not deprive her of a privilege she so highly appreciated, yet that she could never become anything more to him than a friend—in fact, she decidedly and unequivocally refused him.
Ernest was thunderstricken! He was no coxcomb, but neither was he devoid of penetration; and he knew her so well.—had traced, as he believed, so clearly the rise and progress of her affection for him—an affection ripened, and, as it were, sanctified, by their joint attendance beside her mother’s sick bed—that, although from a slight tendency to waywardness which he was aware lurked in her disposition, he anticipated some little difficulty in obtaining her consent to their union, yet the idea that his offer should be met with a calm and deliberate refusal, had never occurred to him even as a possibility. After a minute’s pause, he exclaimed—
“I am grieved,—pained beyond expression!—nay,” he continued, gaining courtage from the strength of his convictions, “I will even dare to add, surprised. Emily, I cannot bring myself to believe that my offer has come upon you unexpectedly; you must have been aware of my affection for you?” Receiving no answer, he continued in a sterner tone, “I am then to understand that, perceiving my attachment, without returning it, you have led me on merely to gratify your heartless vanity, till, in my weak trustfulness, I have placed it in your power to inflict this blow upon me—a blow, the effects of which years will fail to counteract. It is not my pride that is wounded: the little pride I ever possessed has been pretty well taken out of me by the drudgery of life ere this; but that such deep, unselfish love, such entire boundless trust, should have been thus bitterly deceived, thus heartlessly rejected, and by one who seemed all truth, innocence, and gentleness—Oh! it is unnatural, incredible’” He sprang from his chair, and began pacing the room with rapid strides, then continued, “But I will overcome it; it is unworthy to be thus affected—to feel thus for one capable of such deception. No! cost me what it may, I will crush——!”
“Gently, my dear sir, gently: you may crush exactly what you please of your own—your outraged affections, your rejected heart, or that very nice new hat which you purchased in your way through London—though that would be the most wantonly extravagant act of the three; but you mustn’t crush our Rosebud, albeit she is such a heartless little tigress. Ay I you may well stop and look at her! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Carrington! so you ought! And you a clergyman, too!
“Stop and look at her!” Why, what was there to see in that calm, expressionless face, that cold stoical exterior?—only that the said stoicism had turned out a dead failure, broken down with its would-be professor at the critical moment, and there she was crying her woman’s tender heart out, through her woman’s beautiful eyes, more like Niobe than Plato, by long odds.
When Ernest perceived this, he experienced what dear Mrs. ———— would call, in her very affecting third-volume style, “a tremendous revulsion of feeling,” under the influence of which he seated himself beside the weeping Rosebud, and taking her poor, cold, little hand, said—
“Emily, dearest Emily, what is the meaning of all this? Why! you are making yourself as miserable as you have made me! Come, treat me as a friend—a brother: confide in me. You must have some reason for what you are doing. Tell me”—and here, despite his best efforts, his voice faltered—“tell me—your happiness is ever my first consideration, and, even though it involve the ruin of my dearest hopes, I will strive to secure it—do you love another?”
She did not speak; in fact, she could not just at that moment, by reason of the swollen state of the globus-hystericus interfering with the action of the larynx—to write technically—or because of a choking sensation in the throat, if any reader prefers the colloquial style; but she had very expressive eyes, and they said “no” just as plainly, or rather as prettily, as her lips could have done.
Ernest felt better; if she did not love anybody else, she must in time love him. Such affection as his must produce a return—he knew, he felt—but you see the line of argument, dear reader. Well, then, what was the hitch? Ernest pondered; at last, a bright idea occurred to him. The change in Emily had taken place since the previous day. Yes, that was it! So he half muttered aloud, half thought to himself, “Some absurd, romantic, generous scruple about this confounded” (I am afraid he said confounded) “fortune.” He then continued aloud, rather in the tone in which he talked to the very little children in the Sunday-school,—